On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments.

Well, there’s just one more story in the third and penultimate volume of Diana Prince: Wonder Woman, collecting the late ’60s, early ’70s exploits of Wonder Woman when she had suddenly become a non-superpowered, karate-chopping mod. This one’s billed as “a big 3-star issue,” which I guess justifies the price hike from the previous issue’s 15 cents to a whopping 25 cents.

On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments.

I’ve said this before, but one thing I love about writer-artist Mike Sekowsky’s non-superpowered mod version of Wonder Woman is the variety of stories he tells with her. In one issue it’s all espionage and Bond villains, then she’s donning yellowface and a machine gun and fighting the Red Army in China, then she’s off to a medieval world to lead a siege and teach them how to make cannons, and then she’s back to the streets of New York, trying to keep a friend from killing a guy. And now, she’s off to a quaint European kingdom to marry a handsome prince! The only problem is, she doesn’t really want to marry the guy and is just standing in because the real bride’s been kidnapped.

On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments.

Whenever I get back to writing about the swingin’ mod era of 1960s Wonder Woman comics, it’s funny how I keep putting off the Doctor Cyber stories. When one of those is next in the queue, I’ll interrupt things to talk about a special from the 1970s or a loosely related current series instead. Cyber was the big recurring villain of writer/artist Mike Sekowsky’s run on Wonder Woman, which reinvented Diana Prince as a non-superpowered, karate-chopping detective and fashion boutique owner. But the trouble is, Doctor Cyber is just not a very good villain. Sure, her goons killed Diana’s longtime boyfriend Steve Trevor and her new mentor I Ching’s entire Chinese monastery, but Cyber’s master plan is always pretty vague and ill-thought-out (step one, steal lots of money; step two, take over the world!), and the threats she sends after Diana are less than fearsome: trained birds, cute women, armed skiiers.